1) When I just draw the pages directly, it doesn't trigger the DR800's GTK+ to do a full refresh. So, I added an explicit gdk_display_sync and ioctl to make it to the full refresh ... and now it does it twice! At present I'm stumped as per why.

The platform has a hybrid display update mechanism. It automatically tries to determine required updates from GTK+ expose events (see display.c of sysd), and it provides a way to control them via an API in liberutils. Working around these will probably result in various side effects.

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2) The "please wait" dialog isn't disappearing properly. The first thing I do is pop up a file chooser dialog, but when I do that the "please wait" dialog continues to float on top of it indefinitely ... perhaps this is just a bug in the GTK file chooser dialog (not updating properly) ... is it possible to explicitly hide it?

Are you using the original 1.0x or 2.0-beta release?

In the 1.0 release, the dialog is removed as soon as a full screen window is opened, or after 30 seconds. You could try to work around this by opening a window first and show the file chooser dialog on top of it. I don't have the details at hand, but I believe this is reworked in the 2.0 release so that the dialog is removed as soon as the application has started.